Austen Military Connections
Writing during the week of July 4, which celebrates American independence hard won by a ragtag army against the superior British military, I naturally return to a topic I’ve visited before, which is Jane Austen’s connection to the military. Both in her life and in her posterity. I have written of Austen in this regard several different times, and I have learned more since. In this blog and next month’s, I will bring all of that material together.
First, with two brothers, Frank and Charles, in the navy, and another, Henry, in the militia, I wondered about the direct impact of the war on Austen and her family. As described in Jane Austen and Casualties of War — Collins Hemingway, two war-related deaths seriously affected the family. Promotion in the navy often required political patronage, and here, Networking in the Age of Sail — Collins Hemingway, I show how the Austen family enlisted a few well-placed individuals to help the advancement of Jane’s sailor brothers. Their later careers were stymied by a lack of connections, but when they did finally get captaincies, Frank and Charles both filled their ships with relatives and close associates: Sailing the Seas on a Family Ship — Collins Hemingway.
Military readers during later wars ranged from the highest to the lowest. During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was ordered to bed with the flu by doctors—“don’t work, don’t worry.” In a letter at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Churchill wrote that, having read Sense and Sensibility years before, he would now try Pride and Prejudice. He had always thought it would be “better than its rival.” His daughter Sarah read it to him, which she did “beautifully from the foot of the bed.”
Britain's bulldog, Sir Winston Churchill, found Jane Austen comforting when ordered to bed with the flu during World War II. Ordinary soldiers found solace in her writing too.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a short story about a low-ranking soldier in an artillery battery in World War I. Because his officers keep talking of Austen, the artilleryman imagines the existence of a secret society of “Janeites” and reads her novels. When an enemy barrage wipes out the rest of his unit, the wounded artilleryman is stymied by a wordy nurse, who won’t put him on the hospital train. “Make Miss Bates there, stop talkin’ or I’ll die,” he complains. Catching the educated reference to Emma, the head nurse finds a place for him on the train to safety.
Once at the hospital, our artilleryman may have run into Austen again. She was seen as a special benefit for the injured. An Oxford don, H. F. Brett-Smith, was engaged by a military hospital in World War I to advise on reading matter for the wounded. “For the severely shell-shocked, he selected Jane Austen,” according to one of his students, Martin Jarrett-Kerr, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (3 February 1984).
Janine Barchas’s 2019 book, The Lost Books of Jane Austen, reproduces the beautifully grim illustrations of Kipling’s story from Hearst’s International Magazine in May 1924. Barchas also has an image of a combined printing of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, which was one of 1.4 million books donated to the War Service Library in World War I.
Details of the British program have proven difficult to uncover. On the American side, however, the American Library Association (ALA) raised $1.7 million, purchased another 300,000 books, and shipped 109,403 books overseas. The ALA placed 117 librarians in the field, erected 36 libraries across 464 camps, and also distributed 5 million magazines to military personnel.
Donated books, however, did not always match the interests of soldiers in the field. Consequently, in World War II Britain and America created special editions to provide reading material for the military. Britain had several different military editions. America had one program, the Armed Services Editions (ASE). Most of the books were novels.
Probably the best documented but least successful program in England was the Penguin Forces Book Club. Penguin, which pioneered inexpensive but high-quality paperbacks in the 1930s, created a program to provide ten titles a month. The cost, just over 3£ annually, would be picked up by the military unit rather than by individual soldiers and sailors. Two of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were part of the first year’s program of 120 books.
Penguin expected to have 75,000 subscriptions, but the military balked at paying 3£ in advance. Some of the titles, such as Ur of the Chaldees or William Cook—Antique Dealer, were too rarified for the taste of ordinary soldiers. Only about 6,350 subscriptions were sold, and Penguin never produced more than 15,000 books total. Some of these became prisoner of war editions, but it is not certain whether any were ever delivered to POW camps. A later Penguin program also stalled.
Low production runs mean Penguin Forces books are extremely rare. Alastair Jollans, an expert on war editions, has seen only one copy of Northanger Abbey and none of Persuasion in his thirty years of collecting. Barchas scored bigtime years ago by finding copies of both on eBay when she began collecting inexpensive copies of Austen’s works for her new book.
A much more comprehensive British program, the Services Editions, resulted from the efforts of at least five other publishers. According to Jollans, who has tried to put together a complete collection of these editions, about 30 million paperbacks were produced of about 500 different books between 1943 and 1947, separate from the 120 from Penguin. Intended to be disposable, these paperbacks have mostly disappeared.
One Austen-related book was part of this larger program, Guild Publishing’s Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern. Kaye-Smith was a popular novelist in the 1930s, Stern a friend and fellow author. In six essays, the two go back and forth discussing Austen’s works.
Whereas America’s ASE has a complete list of all books published and a complete set of every title in the Library of Congress, the records and copies of the British editions are incomplete. Not one major library or museum in England has a set, nor even a complete list. Jollans says that the only lists of the British editions he knows of are the incomplete ones he has compiled, estimating missing books by gaps in the number sequence of the books he has found. (These used to be listed on a website, but as of 2024 it is no longer active.) The war books bore unique designs and colors, making them readily identifiable.
Lack of information is likely the result of the British program being handled separately by publishers—Collins, Guild, Hodder & Stoughton, Methuen, and Hutchinson (which also offered free “victory” books to homecoming soldiers). In contrast, the U.S. books were published by a single nonprofit with support from the War Production Board and more than seventy publishers.
Britain’s Services Editions and America’s ASE were designed for recreational reading appropriate for troops. ASE’s production of 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were mostly westerns, mysteries, sports, and adventure stories. British literary greats such as Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad were included in the U.S. lists, but not Austen. Longer books were abridged to fit into a soldier’s pocket. One wonders what remained of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which normally weighs in at nine volumes.
Books were handed out to soldiers as they departed, on the assumption that they might soon be isolated and experiencing long periods of boredom between their brief periods of terror. On D-Day, books were given to many soldiers as they stepped onto the invasion barges. One GI was seen reading his book across the choppy waters at Normandy while most of his mates were trying to keep down their breakfasts.
Having served in the military, Churchill knew of the travails of combat. He did not, though, seemed concerned about civilians at home. Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, and no doubt contemplating the burdens of his own position leading the war effort, Churchill remarked in his letter: “What calm lives they had those people. No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”
The prime minister’s observations, of course, were true of the characters in the novel, but not the readers. British military strength totaled about 350,000 during the Napoleonic Wars, and at least as many more were volunteers to be called in case of invasion. Citizens read of the battles, they kept abreast of the casualties, and they observed the thousands of wounded veterans begging for bread in the streets. They knew war as well as their descendants in later titanic battles across the Channel.
My new book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a “Style Entirely New,” examines Austen’s development as a writer and the way her innovations shaped modern fiction. The book is available at a discounted price from Jane Austen Books. Formal launch will be at the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) annual general meeting in October.
The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen is also available from Jane Austen Books and Amazon. The trilogy traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions. A “boxed set” that combines all three in an e-book format is also available.